World Cup and the world’s biggest IPO in one weekend? Pass the popcorn, please.

It’s a huge weekend for Middle East finance nerds who are also football fans — the venn diagram there is … nearly a circle? We have the start of trading of SpaceX shares later today and a weekend of World Cup matches to which to look forward, with Qatar taking to the pitch tomorrow plus Morocco and Türkiye each playing on Sunday.

Don’t expect much more sleep as next week gets underway: Egypt and Tunisia each have games on Monday, while Saudi and Iran play on Tuesday, and Iraq, Jordan, and Algeria all have matches Wednesday.

Our Lede this morning to send you off into the weekend: A look at the unglamorous — but critically important and recently controversial — financial instrument that is the life blood of the consumer and SME finance industries in MENA+.

Also today: Gulf sovereigns show no sign their appetite for AI investments is waning despite the lingering overhang from America’s war with Iran.

Worth reading this morning: Jeff Bezos tells the Financial Times that far from a jobs apocalypse or paperclip-driven extinction-level event, he thinks AI will usher in “multiple golden ages.” His new USD 41 bn Prometheus lab aims to use the technology to transform everything from manufacturing and space to biotech.

“The people who are jumping to the conclusion that the jobs are all going to go away . . . I think these people are just wrong,” Bezos tells the salmon-colored paper, saying that “all of the things that I work on today have something to do with AI. I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of incredible miracles unfold here in the next decade.”

From Swole Bezos to Jeff The Optimist in one clean act. Here’s hoping. –Patrick and Salma